To kick off this blog post, I’d like to transport you back to 1987.Techno is king. You have a haircut that will one day become a source of endless ridicule from your children and grandchildren. Cher looks exactly the same as she does now.

Crucially for our story, a bloke called Steve Wilhite and his team have just invented something called the Graphics Interchange Format (or GIF, for short) that will change the face of the internet.

But you don’t care right now because you’re too preoccupied with perm maintenance and your only experience of the GIF thus far is a pixelated dancing banana with a maniacal grin on its face.